The archaeology of ancient cult: from foundation deposits to religion in Roman Mithraism

Abstract

In the past two decades, the “archaeology of religion” has moved from the margins of scholarship to the center, led by the growth of postprocessual archaeological hermeneutics. 1 Such theoretical frames – whether the materiality of religion, objects as agents, the entanglement of humans and objects, or “thing theory” – demonstrate the centrality of the physical world and its archaeological correlates to religion. They offer new ways of posing questions about the construction of meanings for worshippers through materials.2